Series: Digital Media and Society

Smartphones as Locative Media examines the significant impact of smartphone adoption, which has surpassed 50% of the population in more than 15 countries. With over one million mobile applications available for download, many utilize smartphones as locative media, enabling them to be situated within physical space. These applications are known as location-based services, which form the focus of this insightful...

Twitch is the leading live streaming platform in most of the world and an integral part of contemporary digital gaming culture. Millions of people broadcast their gameplay (as well as other activities) to over a hundred million people who regularly visit the site. In this accessible book, Mark R. Johnson offers both a synthesis of existing Twitch research and a...

The encyclopedia has expanded in scope, scale, and popularity in the digital age. Wikipedia in particular serves as a gateway to information and a flashpoint for disputes over authority, expertise, and cultural perspectives. This innovative book, which includes a foreword by the co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, traces the historical roots of digital encyclopedias in the early development of information...

From café culture to home schooling, remote community networks, and smart cities, Wi-Fi is an invisible but fundamental element of contemporary life. Loosely regulated, low-cost, and largely overlooked by researchers, this technology has driven the rise of the smartphone and broadband internet, and is a vital element in the next wave of automation. Thomas, Wilken, and Rennie provide the first...

Since the rise of the smartphone, apps have become entrenched in billions of users' daily lives. Accessible across phones and tablets, watches and wearables, connected cars, sensors, and cities, they are an inescapable feature of our current culture. In this book, Gerard Goggin provides a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the development of apps as a digital media technology. Covering...

Bots – automated software applications programmed to perform tasks online – have become a feature of our everyday lives, from helping us navigate online systems to assisting us with online shopping. Yet, despite enabling internet users, bots are increasingly associated with disinformation and concerning political intervention. In this ground-breaking book, Monaco and Woolley offer the first comprehensive overview of the...

Facebook has fundamentally changed how the world connects. No other company has played a greater role in the history of social networking online. Yet Facebook is no longer simply a social networking site or social media platform. Facebook is Facebook. Taina Bucher shows how Facebook has become an idea of its own: something that cannot be fully described using broader...

We once thought of cyberspace as a borderless world. As the internet has become increasingly platformized, with a small number of technology giants that dominate the global digital economy, concerns about information monopolies, hateful online content, and the impact on media content creators and creative industries have become more marked. Consequently, governments, politicians, and civil society are questioning how digital...

Launched in 2007, Tumblr became a safe haven for LGBT youth, social justice movements, and a counselling station for mental health issues. For a decade, this micro-blogging platform had more users than either Twitter or Snapchat, but it remained an obscure subculture for non-users. Katrin Tiidenberg, Natalie Ann Hendry, and Crystal Abidin offer the first systematic guide to Tumblr and...

While the working lives of tech entrepreneurs and delivery platform workers seem far removed, both are engaged in digital labour. What unites their experience and allows us to speak of their work under the same umbrella? Is it even possible to talk about digital labour as if it were a single form of work? Digital Labor explores these questions and...

From café culture to home schooling, remote community networks, and smart cities, Wi-Fi is an invisible but fundamental element of contemporary life. Loosely regulated, low-cost, and largely overlooked by researchers, this technology has driven the rise of the smartphone and broadband internet, and is a vital element in the next wave of automation. Thomas, Wilken, and Rennie provide the first...

Over the last four decades, new modes of communication have redefined people’s engagement with media: media audiences are now also makers, influencers, followers, gamers, trolls, and data subjects. This turbulent social and technological context has created new opportunities for expression and activism around the world. In this fully revised second edition, Leah Lievrouw considers the shift toward algorithmic media for...

Podcasting burst onto the media landscape in the early 2000s. At the time, there were hopes it might usher in a new wave of amateur and professional cultural production and represent an alternate model for how to produce, share, circulate, and experience new voices and perspectives. Twenty years later, podcasting is at a critical juncture in its relatively young history:...

In the 2010s, as chat apps became a primary mode of communication for many people across the world, WhatsApp quickly outpaced rival messaging apps and developed into a platform. In this book, the authors provide a comprehensive account of WhatsApp’s global growth. Charting WhatsApp’s evolution from its founding in 2009 to the present day, they argue that WhatsApp has been...

More objects and devices are connected to digital networks than ever before. Things - from your phone to your car, from the heating to the lights in your house - have gathered the ability to sense their environments and create information about what is happening. Things have become media, able to both generate and communicate information. This has become known...

Since its acquisition and rebranding in 2018, TikTok has become one of the fastest growing platforms in the world. Moreover, it's the first Chinese-developed platform to find mainstream international success, carving its own niche in the global short video industry. In the first comprehensive exploration of TikTok, Kaye, Zeng, and Wikström provide a history of the emergent genre of short...

Launched in 2007, Tumblr became a safe haven for LGBT youth, social justice movements, and a counselling station for mental health issues. For a decade, this micro-blogging platform had more users than either Twitter or Snapchat, but it remained an obscure subculture for nonusers. Katrin Tiidenberg, Natalie Ann Hendry, and Crystal Abidin offer the first systematic guide to Tumblr and...

Twitter is a household name, discussed for its role in national elections, natural disasters, and political movements, as well as for what some malign as narcissistic "chatter." The first edition of Murthy’s balanced and incisive book pioneered the study of this medium as a serious platform worthy of scholarly attention. Much has changed since Twitter’s infancy, although it is more...

In this compelling book, Graeme Kirkpatrick argues that computer games have fundamentally altered the relation of self and society in the digital age. Tracing the origins of gaming to the revival of play in the 1960s counterculture, Computer Games and the Social Imaginary describes how the energies of that movement transformed computer technology from something ugly and machine-like into a...

Search engines have become a key part of our everyday lives. Yet there is growing concern with how algorithms, which run just beneath the surface of our interactions online, are affecting society. This timely new edition of Search Engine Society enlightens readers on the forms of bias that algorithms introduce into our knowledge and social spaces, drawing on recent changes...

More objects and devices are connected to digital networks than ever before. Things - from your phone to your car, from the heating to the lights in your house - have gathered the ability to sense their environments and create information about what is happening. Things have become media, able to both generate and communicate information. This has become known...

Since the first edition was published in 2009, Patrik Wikström's The Music Industry has become a go-to text for students and scholars. This thoroughly updated third edition provides an international overview of the music industry and its future prospects in the world of global entertainment. The music industry has experienced two turbulent decades of immense change brought about in part...